Former Sun Microsystems chief and co-founder Scott McNealy has re-appeared to champion open source and rough up billionaire Larry Ellison, the man who bought his baby.
Speaking at PostgreSQL West 2010, McNealy urged devs to drive adoption of their database against Oracle's proprietary products and MySQL by working with other …

I guess you forget

The chief difference between Ellison and McNealy:

Ellison won't be caught asleep at the wheel.

The open source community be damned - none of them live in the real world, anyway. Many are a bunch of fascists who believe that software engineering should not be a paid career. "Information wants to be free", and all that crap.

Look around many "open source" communities, and you will find a distinct lack of tolerance for anyone who doesn't do it "the proper way" (that means a Linux kernel and GNU toolchain.)

If you want to use a different OS for your project, such as *BSD, Haiku, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, or - God forbid, Windows, you're treated with derision.

If you want to use anything other than the GNU, you're looked upon as a moron (despite the fact that Intel and Sun compilers whip GNU's ass when it comes to performance on mainstream hardware.)

If, heaven forbid, you think you might actually make some money out of work you put in, then you're just a greedy capitalist.

I'm sorry, but I do have to ask: If open source is no longer about choice, what is it good for?

re: Really?

See image

GNU never said you're not allowed to make money out of your work

All it says is you're not allowed to enslave the end-users with your work. It is OK if you want to lock them in, twist their arm and squeeze their wallet, just don't use free software for that. Pick any proprietary license like others do.

Oh, and for me as an end-user, I certainly want that MY information remains free at least for myself if not for others. Even if this is crap for you, I don't want anybody to put a lock on my own data.

The BSD licence allows that.

Publish under a BSD licence, and your work is still available - for free - to anyone.

If someone decides to add to your work, then they are free to decide whether they release the source. But what is wrong with that? If your original code is so good, why would you worry about someone coming along and making the next revision closed-source?

This, I think, is the main reason why open source has failed to impress the masses - despite having had a 2-decade opportunity to take over the world.

One other thing:

Probably the biggest problem the BSD licence has is that is requires developers to see past their own egos. If you can manage that, you're in a rather exclusive club.

Releasing a piece of code under BSD is about true freedom.

Releasing a piece of code under GNU is simply about the developer pushing their own brand of politics on everyone else.

The biggest argument I've heard in favour of GNU is about keeping the code open. Well, the BSD licence does that - and with none of the drawbacks of using the GNU licence. If, for example, you want to grab the TCP/IP stack code from BSD UNIX, go right ahead and check out a copy - it's still out there. Does it matter that derivatives of the code also exist in several other products, if it meets your needs?

Many bits and pieces of code that are now licenced under GNU were not originally licenced as such by their original authors - they were licenced under BSD. The BSD licence, however, does not forbid re-licencing of the code - GNU does. It is worth arguing that the GNU software repository would be a lot smaller than it is now were it not for the flexibility of the BSD licence - something that many GNU proponents are quick to forget.

GNU is simply about politics and a few large egos - nothing more. It's not about freedom, and it is certainly not about choice. There are quite a few GNU devs out there who now like to use Macs at home, and they talk a lot about them. For those fans of the Mac, I will leave this question as an exercise for the reader: Why do you think Apple chose FreeBSD as a base for OS X, and not Linux - which was far more developed as a desktop platform when Apple made the switch? Even Apple was not the first to do so - Solaris (formerly SunOS) was itself based on BSD 4. Yet both Solaris and OS X are now products that many customers STILL choose to pay money to run, while Linux desktop market share has yet to break the 2% barrier, despite Apple charging truly wicked margins on their hardware and yet easily managing more than 4x the desktop market share of Linux, which - even though it costs nothing - still has the appeal of a piece of dog excrement to the other 98.66%.

What does that tell you about the value of freedom, versus the value of politics?

PostgreSQL gettin' its props

Indeed

Postgres has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years but still failed to get the media attention it arguably deserves. So very nice to see El Reg covering Pg West. And, whatever one thinks about McNealy (in my view it was his successor who made the really odd business decisions), he's certainly headline and I'm guess that many former customers will listen to what he says.

Back to Postgres: Enterprise DB's Oracle compatible version is fantastic for customers wanting to escape the kraken without too much pain. The MySQL migration tool looks quite good as well - need to give it a spin with a customers database to see how it fares - and is bound to reassure existing MySQL customers who may be looking to jump ship. Not that you need "Postgres Plus" for serious development but it is important to know that professional support is available if desired. I can't help thinking that the permissive BSD licence helps here: no lawyers required.

He should have put his money where his mouth is long before that

Well, if supporting OpenSource is so great why didn't he put his money where his mouth is when he was at the helm?

Why didn't he support MySQL instead of aquiring it? Why didn't he support Postgres consistently (and not just on occasions reversing the support policy more than twice in 10 years)? Why didn't he support Quagga consistently instead of hiring firing developers working on it depending on his agenda at the time? Why didn't he... I can continue with a long list of open source projects on which Sun has done a volte-face at least twice in the last 10 years and under his management before the chaos of Schwarz.

As my dad used to say (with a fake german accent): Less schprehen, more arbeiten.

Put your money where your mouth is Scott. While I am not a Larry fan by no means, the man has to be given credit where he deserves it - he DOES put his money where his mouth is.

Gripe all you want..

Gripe about McNealy driving Sun into the ground if you like, but if you use OpenOffice, NFS or any number of other common technologies you have him to thank.

Larry is in it for Larry. He's systematically stomping out the good (don't deny it, Sun did lots of good) done by Sun and all that will be left is his locked-down versions of mySQL, Java and Solaris. Larry is evil. Filthy stinking rich, but totally evil.

McNealy invented NFS?!

I don't think so.

I would thank the engineers who worked at Sun (many were very clever people - I know - they were my colleagues) - but I would not thank the management, who actually held back development more often than not. It's also quite clear that McNealy and Schwartz lost the plot quite a while back - they forgot *why* Sun was so successful.

One of the chief differences between a CEO like Scott McNealy and one like, say, Andy Grove, is that Grove understood his business - all the way from top-level strategy to nuts and bolts. Grove was a details man. McNealy was not. Grove, like Ellison, also had balls of steel - and he intimidated his competitors at every turn. That's business, boys and girls: Business is war. Never forget that.

You're damn right that Larry is in it for Larry, though. But why shouldn't he be? You should not expect quarter from any capitalist who knows their business - and Larry is a typical capitalist. Nothing wrong there. You'll find a good capitalist at the head of any successful company.

However, rather than moaning about Larry being ruthless (which is, after all, business as usual), one should be questioning why either of Sun's former two CEOs got away with behaving like total marshmallows - and yet NEITHER of them got crucified by the board or Sun's shareholders.

Snoracle

Why so fast to slag off the boating?

Everyone seems to be tearing Oracle and Ellison a new one for sponsoring a big boat, why are we not having a go at other companies who do the same? And hows this any different to say Formula 1 sponsorship, which again no one bats an eye at?

No-one cares about your opinion

RE: No-one cares about your opinion

And where would be the fun in that, Sunshiner? So much more fun to expose fools like yourself - do you actually have any opinion on the matter in hand? Do you think McNeedy should be listened to with caution, ignored, or his every word taken as some IT gospel? Do you think his previous poor relationship with the Linux community should be taken into account when he champions OSS? Come on, just try and post something that a five-year-old couldn't top for a change.

Scott McNeedy and OSS? Meh!

So, all of a sudden, Scotty loves OSS? Was he wearing the penguin suit again? Yes, those that laughed at his rediculous flip-flops over Linux will see this for EXACTLY what it really is - McNeedy has some short-term scheme that he thinks will make money for McNeedy and Co, and that is the ONLY reason for his sudden infatuation with PostgresSQL. As soon as his latest scheme falls flat on its face he'll be back to hating OSS again.

How do you know McNeedy's talking utter and complete male bovine manure? Easy, it's when his lips are moving.

Instead of telling people to leave Oracle...

... they should start first delivering a database that could actually do what Oracle does. Unless you have very basic needs (and probably you're not using Oracle already) or use your database just like a data dump, there's a lot you can do with Oracle that databases like Postgres can only dream of. C'mon, Postgres still lacks properly LOB support, and wants to compete with Oracle? Look at poor-man-partitioning in Postgres, and its backup facilities for large, complex databases? Who cares if it is open source, I am not going to implement LOB support or many other advanced features myself, I have no problem to buy then from someone who spend the time and the money to implement them - and like me many others users who runs databases that do more than support a web site. Postgres competitors are MySQL, Firebird and SQLite, not Oracle.

Unless many OS project don't understand they shoud be market-drive and not developer's whims-and-dreams-driven, they won't go far and they will keep on being surprised why people keep on using the most powerful products, although proprietary and expensive.